Snowlines: Skiers seek taste of the high life

By COLIN MOORE

Pie and coke may have once been sufficient fuel to sustain a hard day on the slopes but it won't do now. Modern skiers expect something a tad more classy to go with their $60 lift tickets. And they're getting it.

From Aspen, Colorado, to Queenstown, Otago, a lunch break on the slopes can be long and luxurious with gourmet food and fine wines to wash it down.

"Skiers have become more sophisticated," says Craig Tempero, food and beverage manager at the Cardrona Alpine Resort at Wanaka. "What is happening in the cities is being reflected on the ski slopes."

That means, for instance, a trend towards healthy food.

"Gone are the days when we could just offer red meat," says Tempero. "We have to cater for vegans and vegetarians, and we make lots of soup."

Karen Marinkovic, head chef at Cardrona's upmarket Mezz Cafe, has cooked in top-class cafes from Titirangi to Wanaka, where she turned up on a ski holiday seven years ago.

Her soup and pasta are fresh every day and made from scratch.

The Cardrona pizzas use Strasberg ham that Tempero imports from Australia and the bases are made fresh each day.

The resort even makes its own sauces and has its own coffee mix.

"At Vail in Colorado skiers pay up to $US100 [$NZ225] for their lunch," says Tempero. "We are still three to five years from that but it will come."

The less sophisticated need not worry too much, however. High protein and high carbohydrate is catered for with pizzas, toasted sandwiches and fries.

Cardrona is the third largest user of pre-cut potato fries in the South Island. The other two are both skifields.

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Some people are born to be skiers while most of us are not, but help is at hand thanks to a bit of computer magic.

Those of us not born to be skiers have legs and feet of odd shapes and sizes which, when locked into a pair of rigid ski boots, make us look nothing at all like a fancy ski instructor.

I solved my problem this year at the Aspen mountain performance centre in Colorado. With my boots off I was rigged up to some fancy computer software which measured my natural stance and the shape of my foot and showed how I would put pressure on a ski.

The results were then fed into a machine which cut my very own ski boot insole.

The idea is that the tailormade footbed will make my leg bones stand straight while I am skiing so that my bones, rather than muscles and tendons, will absorb pressure, my feet will not get tired and I will have good circulation.

At first the new insole felt hard, but then it was meant to; those that come with skiboots tend to be too forgiving. The performance footbed is more responsive.

The acid test was skiing.

For $US165 I wanted to be comfortable and ski like a rock star.

"Hey, your skiing has really improved," said Bridget Rayward, president of the New Zealand Ski Instructors Alliance, when I skied with her that afternoon.

"Like a rock star?" I asked.

No comment.

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So much for the deregulated society and an end to Big Brother telling us what is best for us.

The Commerce Commission says it has skiers' best interests at heart in its preliminary view against the proposed merger of the Whakapapa and Turoa skifields.

It just happens that most consumers who use the Mt Ruapehu fields disagree.

They have enough nous to understand that Turoa is in receivership because running a snow-related business on that mountain is tough going.

And the best chance of both fields staying in business is with the savings that would come with a merger. The two fields are complementary. Let them become one.